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Topics

Featured in Development

Go Channels: Understanding Happens-Before for Safe Concurrency

This article dives into the happens-before semantics of Go channels, explaining how they relate to memory visibility, synchronization, and concurrency correctness. We'll examine subtle pitfalls, illustrate them with examples, and explore the architectural implications for system designers.

Go Channels: Understanding Happens-Before for Safe Concurrency

All in development

Architecture & Design

Featured in Architecture & Design

Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from Over Twenty Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure

Building resilient platforms requires understanding the art and science of creating infrastructure that others depend on for critical applications. This perspective applies to anyone who builds software consumed by others at scale. Whether developing infrastructure platforms, software development platforms, or messaging systems, principles address how to build software that others consume at scale

Building Resilient Platforms: Insights from Over Twenty Years in Mission-Critical Infrastructure

All in architecture-design

AI Infrastructure

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Growing and Cultivating Strong Machine Learning Engineers

Vivek Gupta shares best practices for managing and mentoring ML engineers, from early-career development to senior leadership growth. He breaks down the crucial, distinct skills for Production Machine Learning, including data/model management, building training pipelines, LLM prompt evaluation, privacy/security, and integrating human-in-the-loop processes for reliable, scalable AI systems.

Growing and Cultivating Strong Machine Learning Engineers

All in ai-ml-data-eng

Culture & Methods

Featured in Culture & Methods

Productivity Is Messing Around and Having Fun

Holly Cummins & Trisha Gee explain how to achieve the "Double Win" - boosting both developer joy and productivity. They expose the flaws of traditional metrics, identify sources of developer toil (slow builds, flaky tests), and share methods and techniques (like boredom and play) for engineering leaders and architects to unlock creativity and a 31% boost in positive-brain productivity.

Productivity Is Messing Around and Having Fun

All in culture-methods

Featured in DevOps

When Reverse Proxies Surprise You: Hard Lessons from Operating at Scale

Operating massive reverse proxy fleets reveals hard lessons: optimizations that work on smaller systems fail at scale; mundane oversights like missing commas cause major outages; and abstractions meant to simplify become hidden fragility points. Success requires profiling on target hardware, relentlessly monitoring boring details, keeping hot paths lean, and trusting instrumentation over theory.

When Reverse Proxies Surprise You: Hard Lessons from Operating at Scale

Events

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QCon San Francisco 2025

Get production-proven patterns from the leaders who scaled a GenAI search platform to millions, migrated a core ML system without downtime, and architected a global streaming service from the ground up.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon AI New York 2025

Move beyond AI demos to real engineering impact. Discover how teams embed LLMs, govern models, and scale inference pipelines to accelerate development securely.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

QCon London 2026

Benchmark your systems against leading engineering teams. See what really works in FinOps, modern Java, and distributed data architectures to balance cost, scale, and reliability.

Early Bird ends Nov 11.

InfoQ Homepage Presentations Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design

Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design

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Speed:

58:17

Summary

For years the norm for developers was to work in an iterative and incremental manner but for database developers to work in a more serial manner. The predominance of evolutionary development methods make it clear that the two groups need to work in the same manner to be productive as a team. Pramod presents material from "Refactoring Databases " on implementing evolutionary database development.

Bio

Pramod Sadalage is the co-author of the 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning "Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Development" and author of "Recipes for Continuous Database Integration". Pramod works as a DBA and developer at ThoughtWorks on large custom-developed applications which use agile. He has pioneered the practices and processes of agility in the database.

About the conference

QCon is a conference that is organized by the community, for the community.The result is a high quality conference experience where a tremendous amount of attention and investment has gone into having the best content on the most important topics presented by the leaders in our community. QCon is designed with the technical depth and enterprise focus of interest to technical team leads, architects, and project managers.

Recorded at:

Mar 06, 2009

by

Pramod Sadalage

This content is in the Architecture topic

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